Late July 1944: the author receives the gentleman's accounting in full, attempts one countermeasure, and is graded on it. The installment ends with a piece of Army paperwork whose timing the reader is invited to sit with. —Ed.
The photograph I burned the night I got it, in the coffee stove at Omega, which took some doing with a crew of insomniacs about; the inscription needed no keeping — it recited itself at two in the morning without my assistance. By Wednesday I had stopped shaking and started on the insurance.
I could not touch Anton — no name, no lodging, no nation of convenience, no Saturdays. But I could arrange for the hunting in Santa Fe to be done by men I fed personally: if you cannot stop the search, own the search party. At my monthly weather-report with Captain de Silva I let fall, with the reluctance of a man betraying a confidence, that there had been talk at the La Fonda bar of a stranger asking after the bus schedules to the Hill — a big sandy fellow, loud, Scandinavian off the boat by his vowels, free with his money. Every detail the precise opposite of the small grey punctual article I was insuring against. De Silva wrote it down with the happiness of a man who has been given something at last to be captain about. A counter-intelligence office must be fed foxes, or it begins on the poultry.
The result exceeded my hopes and fell, as my results generally do, on somebody else. That Saturday the plainclothes pair swept up a landscape painter out of the Taos colony — six foot of Scandinavian bone, paint under his nails, a voice you could hear across the plaza — and sweated him for three days about bus schedules he had never asked after. The blanket Indians under the Palace portal will have watched the whole show with all the animation of their own pottery; your Pueblo would sit through the Second Coming without knocking a dime off his pots. Santa Fe kept its painters the way other towns keep pigeons, decorative and loud at dawn and living off what the tourists dropped, so the town took the entertainment in good part, and no harm done: I am told he later sold the arrest scene, in oils, for more than my year's pay, so justice was done all around, which is more than most informers can claim for their work.1
The next note did not name the café. It named the cathedral, after the eleven o'clock — the one appointment a Mex keeps, and he keeps it kneeling. I attended the mass entire — back pew, exits counted, the end seat cleared of a supply sergeant with a whisper that his motor pool was being inventoried, a dime in the box as insurance across all denominations — while the Archbishop's men sang over my head about the God who sees everything and files it, a doctrine I was coming to respect from parallel experience. The front-pew widows had me placed by the Kyrie; your devout widow is the one watcher who works free, and G-2 never fielded her equal. Anton was outside afterward with a guidebook, in the pose of a tourist admiring the stonework, and we walked — down toward the river, along the Alameda, two gentlemen taking the air — while he opened his ledger and read me my account.
He did it without paper, in the order a lawyer would choose, in a voice fit for reciting train times. Born April of 1923, Astoria; the birth certificate with its six borrowed letters — "your mother's good sense; I admire a practical woman." Caltech, the class of '44 that never was. The plates — "the fifth was the error; an artist must know when to stop, but then you know that now." Mrs. Prine, the Duesenberg, cream over black — "a serious machine; the husband bought taste and she drove it." The exact wording, and he had it exact, of what I told the corporal at Fort Monmouth. The yes at 109 East Palace. And then, folding the guidebook under his arm as we turned along the water: "And your captain. We find your captain a great convenience. A man who reports to counter-intelligence every month is a man nobody else troubles to watch. You have arranged your own privacy, Corporal. It is the mark of quality."
I asked him — a man asks, even knowing — how it was assembled, and got the only lecture he ever gave me: four sentences. Nothing was stolen. Everything was given. Consulates hear things; lawyers lunch. "Your grave in Pasadena had two pallbearers, and one of them dines with friends of ours and likes to talk about the cleverest thing he ever buried — and kept a print, of course. Lawyers keep everything. It is their tragedy."2
Two years of construction recited back in twenty minutes, every load-bearing lie priced, the whole acquired for the cost of some lunches. I attempted my one counterstroke — mentioned, as a comradely warning, that security was stirred up, some Norwegian they were hunting — and Anton stopped to admire the river and said, without any change of voice: "Your Norwegian. Yes. We admired him. Next time give him a limp. A limp is remembered, and never checked." And walked on, leaving my summer's best misdirection marked like a student exercise and handed back with corrections.
The ask, when it finally came, was the size he had promised. Nothing today — almost nothing. When I traveled — "you will travel; couriers travel" — I would take lunch with a friend of his in Chicago. No name. "He will know you. You will not need to know him." That was the whole invoice: lunch. "You have lunched with worse, Corporal," he said, which was true, and getting truer by the minute.
I said I had no orders for Chicago. It was my last card, and I played it with the confidence of a man who has checked the rotation board.
Anton consulted his watch, and put away the guidebook, and shook my hand like a claims adjuster closing a file that has never once been in doubt.
"You will have," he said.
Vera received me at the La Fonda at four, and asked no questions, being a woman of one subject, which is one more than most, and G-2's watchers filed me under the usual heading, and everyone in Santa Fe was served according to his needs, which I understand was the other side's slogan that year. And on the Tuesday following, Pomeroy came beaming down the corridor with a flimsy in his hand — a courier detail, a sealed pouch for the Metallurgical Laboratory, the Friday train from Lamy, and wasn't it a feather in the section's cap that they'd asked for Klipspringer by name.3 Nobody in uniform looks behind a compliment; vanity is the one channel the Army leaves unguarded. I signed for it on the bent back of a passing clerk.
I have read a great deal, in the years since, about the vast lumbering slowness of the Soviet services, and I daresay it is all true. I can only report what the record shows and my spine remembers: the Army cut my orders on Tuesday.4
Anton had cut them on Saturday.
The painter was real, and the detention is in G-2's Santa Fe summaries for July 1944: three days, on a description — tall, fair, Scandinavian accent, asking after bus schedules — that appears in no other file, attributed to "informant, reliable." He exhibited Arrest, Santa Fe (oil on board) the following spring. The author's accounting of who was served by all this is the author's. —Ed.
Of the two attorneys who lunched in June 1942, one appears in later congressional records as a Guild member of the relevant vintage; he died in 1961, which makes him, for the purposes of these Papers, ideal — accused of exactly the crime that can no longer be checked. The reader has met this maneuver before. Against it the editor can set only this: somebody photographed the plate, and the class of men who keep what they have promised to bury is not large, and is composed entirely of lawyers. —Ed.
The courier detail is in the record, cut on the Tuesday the author names, with the annotation "requested by name." Who did the requesting, the file does not preserve. —Ed.
The Technical Area's courier rotations were chalked on a board as much as a week in advance; the author's Saturday preceded the relevant posting by three days. Three days is not nothing. It is also not the devil. The reader may choose, and should perhaps be told, before choosing, that the author reviewed this installment's dates in 2000 against his own leave register, his housekeeper attests, "three times, with the ruler." —Ed.